Developer fails to pay county fees

For the past three years, residents of the Meadows at West Hempstead, a 53-home development in Lakeview, have been enduring a lack of municipal services because the developer refused to pay required Nassau County fees. But it was an incident earlier this year that was the last straw.

In late January, a heavy snowstorm pounded the region for two days. While snowplows were out in force across Long Island, residents of the Meadows looked out their windows and waited. No snowplows came. They were stranded — without a way to seek or receive emergency services if needed.

Why didn’t the snowplows come? Because the developer, Meadowood Properties LLC, has yet to pay the county’s mandatory recharge basin dedication fee. This one-time, $50,000 fee would “dedicate” the development’s streets to the Town of Hempstead, making the town responsible for its municipal services, including snow removal.

“The developer allegedly contested his legal obligation to pay the dedication fee to the county, despite the county’s local law imposing the charge,” said District 2 County Legislator Siela Bynoe, who has been working to rectify the situation since January.

The fee, according to the developer’s attorney, Albert D’Agostino, was thought by his client to be an illegal tax, and Meadowood Properties refused to pay it.

This spring, Meadows resident Jason Jeremiah contacted Bynoe and D’Agostino, and invited them to a community meeting at his home on May 16 to discuss a possible solution to the problem. “The developer’s attorney did not want he and I at the same meeting,” Bynoe said, “so his meeting took place at 5 p.m. and mine at 6.” At the early meeting, D’Agostino, who, coincidentally, is a member of the county’s Board of Ethics, told residents that Meadowood Properties still believed it had no duty, and therefore had no intention, to pay the mandatory county fee, Jeremiah said.

During Bynoe’s meeting an hour later, she planned to discuss how the community could move forward with a solution without the cooperation of the developer, but she discovered something very important instead. “One of the women said she believed she was actually charged that fee, once she … saw the terminology regarding the recharge basin,” Bynoe recounted. “Then the family got their contract out, and confirmed it was a fee passed on to the community.”

The residents gathered 15 closing statements on their properties, each of which stated that the buyer had paid Meadowood Properties $985 for the recharge basin fee as part of the closing costs — and the developer was refusing to pay the county. It is unclear how many of the homes owners paid the $985, but D’Agostino said that not all of them did, because each contract was negotiated separately.

For the past three years, nonpayment of the fee has made it impossible for the community to be recognized as part of the Town of Hempstead, because it is still considered private property, Jeremiah said. “We haven’t received street cleaning services, we are put at risk during snowstorms, and we aren’t receiving the maintenance of our water pipes,” he said. “We have filthy brown water. We also fought hard to get the school buses to come and pick up the kids.”

D’Agostino said he only became aware that the fee had been passed on to the homebuyers after the meeting at Jeremiah’s home, and that he did not draft the contracts for Meadowood Properties.

“How could the developer properly demand to be reimbursed for a fee it had not paid and had no intention of paying?” Bynoe asked D’Agostino in a letter dated June 8. “If that is the case, I have been advised that the purchasers may have been subjected to a serious deceptive business practice.”

Calls to Meadowood Properties LLC’s principal James Neisloss seeking comment were not returned.

Bynoe said she was confident that the impasse would be resolved, because the developer has now agreed to pay the fee. “I also received a call from the state attorney general’s office,” she said, “who asked that they be kept apprised of the situation.”